D&D General Effect of Druids on Scientific Knowledge in your Campaign?

[niklinna]

Everyone's bringing up a lot of ways to avoid this question, but what about embracing this question? Druids develop various theories that end up becoming the foundation to biology. Eventually, druids come to understand microscopic life exists due to their studies, and beyond that, they learn about cells and DNA and start testing naughty word out with plants like that one priest did IRL. Next thing you know, its 2077 and druids are running gene-altering companies to fund their preservation planets built throughout the cosmos via terraforming 9th level rituals.

And somewhere along the way you had GENEFORGE!

 

[GMMichael]

Everyone's bringing up a lot of ways to avoid this question, but what about embracing this question? . . . Next thing you know, its 2077 and druids are running gene-altering companies to fund their preservation planets built throughout the cosmos via terraforming 9th level rituals.

I'm not super-excited about running a 2077 druid, but...

Druids can probably see the writing on the wall and logical conclusions of human scientific development: factory farms, animal testing, GMOs. The irony is that this puts them in a similar position as oil companies; they need to disrupt and confuse the findings of science to promote their (polar opposite) goals.

...I did call on druids to start subverting science. A "gene-altering company" sounds like something an oil company stockholder would get into. But it sounds like the antithesis of natural order, so I don't see druids getting involved. They might see the beauty of germs though, and how they naturally kill off those creatures who can't maintain a natural balance. And then they might spread them.

 

[Umbran]

If there were DnD Druids and Rangers and Elves, and etc... how much of this would be widely known everywhere at a technologically much earlier stage than IRL? What else would they know - germ theory? Would they tell it widely? Would they be believed? Or would those nature facts not be true in your campaign world (do barnacle geese come from barnacles)? Would the presence of magical origins confound it all (would regular birds not be distinguishable from regular ones)?

"..how much of this would be widely known everywhere at a technologically much earlier stage..." (emphasis mine)

The first question in my mind is how much of "this" (meaning, the biological sciences as we know them) is even true in the fantasy world?

In our world, many of the facts of biology ultimately stem from evolution as a driving principle. The fact that we have "reptiles" and "mammals" and "birds" and so on is a result of evolution. But loads of our fantasy worlds have gods that are real and created the fictional worlds. Those biological systems, then, are not the result of evolution, and only need to look like our biology on the larger scale, on the surface.

And trying to patch modern scientific reality onto fantasy runs afoul of the same issues when we try too hard to explain science fiction that isn't actually consistent with real-world physical law. Star Trek's warp drive (any FTL, actually) starts causing consistency and causality issues if you look too closely at it. Similarly, having modern real world "genetics" in your fantasy game world falls apart when you also have dragons that can breed with anything, and owlbears that are patched together owls and bears..

The real world has the benefit of the anthropic principle - it has to be self-consistent, or we would not be in it to view it. Your fantasy world does not have that restriction, and you can, with very few steps, throw real-world science out the window. As soon as you concern yourself with how much "science" your fantasy world knows, you are opening yourself up to revealing all the inconsistencies in your fantasy.

 

[Blue Orange]

This is a really interesting question. I always thought of wizards as the 'scientists of magic', and they're often portrayed similarly. There was quite a bit of overlap between Renaissance magic and early science, and you have stuff like Harry Potter that endows them with the modern (or 19th-century) academic apparatus.

But druids as biologists...wow, that's a totally new angle I hadn't thought of. Vaguely reminds me of the whole 'live in harmony with nature versus try to control it' dichotomy I seemed to see so much in the 90s when I was consuming a lot more media...not sure what they've done with that now. You even have the possibility of wizard-druid wars where the worldviews literally fight.

One more thing (and other people have said this) is that there's no guarantee the natural world works the way it does in real life. You could even go with a Mage: the Ascension-style 'reality is subjective' take where animal intelligence varies depending how far away from the city you get (except for the rats, which of course have a fully developed civilization beneath the city complete with folktales about how to outwit the slow, tailless giants who provide their food).

 

[Voadam]

So I don't really have druids, or anyone else, classify animals into kingdom, phylum, class, family, genus, and species. Did I miss one? I really feel like I missed one.

Order.

King Phillip Came Over From . . .

 

[Blue Orange]

There's actually a higher-order one now, 'domain'. There are three:
Archaea (weird bacteria with different membranes)
Bacteria (other bacteria)
Eukarya (everything else)

Ironically the Archaea are closer to us in the Eukarya than the Bacteria are.

 

[MGibster]

This is a really interesting question. I always thought of wizards as the 'scientists of magic', and they're often portrayed similarly. There was quite a bit of overlap between Renaissance magic and early science, and you have stuff like Harry Potter that endows them with the modern (or 19th-century) academic apparatus.

I think D&D encouraged that kind of thinking with the divide between arcane and divine magic. Back in the day, magic-users studied magic, learning from books, and clerics just prayed and received their spells that way. It's a dichotomy that is less noticable with new arcane classes like the warlock and sorcerer.

 

[Cadence]

There's actually a higher-order one now, 'domain'. There are three:

Had to go googling for things - Wikipedia suggests...

• "Dumb kids playing catch on freeways get squashed"
• "Despicable King Phillip Came Over For Grandma's Specialty."
• "Drunken Kangaroos Punch Children On Family Game Shows" (from the show The Game Theorists)

Replace Phillip with David for Botany.

In any case, Is cladistics taking a sledge hammer to traditional taxonomic levels as being that big of a thing?

 

[Shardstone]

This is a really interesting question. I always thought of wizards as the 'scientists of magic', and they're often portrayed similarly. There was quite a bit of overlap between Renaissance magic and early science, and you have stuff like Harry Potter that endows them with the modern (or 19th-century) academic apparatus.

But druids as biologists...wow, that's a totally new angle I hadn't thought of. Vaguely reminds me of the whole 'live in harmony with nature versus try to control it' dichotomy I seemed to see so much in the 90s when I was consuming a lot more media...not sure what they've done with that now. You even have the possibility of wizard-druid wars where the worldviews literally fight.

One more thing (and other people have said this) is that there's no guarantee the natural world works the way it does in real life. You could even go with a Mage: the Ascension-style 'reality is subjective' take where animal intelligence varies depending how far away from the city you get (except for the rats, which of course have a fully developed civilization beneath the city complete with folktales about how to outwit the slow, tailless giants who provide their food).

Oh man, Synthetic Life created by wizards sent marching against terraformed worlds throughout the cosmos would be a pretty nuts wild campaign idea. Thanks for the idea seed!

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Watching the BBC Earth channel on Roku with Attenborough, and was kind of shocked at how recently things like caterpillars turning into butterflies, birds migrating instead of hibernatinf, and whales being mammals and not fish became "scientifically known" and accepted.

If there were DnD Druids and Rangers and Elves, and etc... how much of this would be widely known everywhere at a technologically much earlier stage than IRL? What else would they know - germ theory? Would they tell it widely? Would they be believed? Or would those nature facts not be true in your campaign world (do barnacle geese come from barnacles)? Would the presence of magical origins confound it all (would regular birds not be distinguishable from regular ones)?

The thing is there is a lot to unpack there. A lot prescientific natural philosophy came from rich people (mainly men) that actual wrote stuff down and they were prone to thinking in terms of philosophy and the believe that the nature of reality could be derived from pure reasoning. People who might be in the position to know the relationship of caterpillars and butterflies were usually not in a position to write their observations down.
The notion of the scientific method, where stuff was not accepted without observational evidence and inductive reasoning from observation came much later. Social standing, and the connection of manual works with slavery probably plays a big role in this.

Then there is the nature of magic, in a reality where magic exists, then magic is as fundamental a force of nature as gravity or electromagnetism. However, we as players and game creators tend to model our fantasy worlds as if some or all of the magical world view of our ancestors was actually true.

Where you end up depends a lot on where you want to go and what assumption you want to make. Also, on the amount of rigor or not on the fundamental nature of magic. I am not sure we could really do a from the ground up take on magic because we have no idea on how it might really work.